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Monday 23 October 2017

Unhighlighting text marked for redaction

Recently I was redacting the names and personal information from a pdf version of a student's assignment, because it was being sent away for moderation. As I was going through, I selected some of the wrong text. If I redacted at this point, I would redact something that should not be redacted. "No problem," I thought, "I will simply undo". But that didn't work. So I went to the redaction toolbar. No useful options there either. Next stop, Adobe Acrobat Help. And that was unhelpful also.

Trying to reverse my inadvertent redaction took me a bit of a hunt via Google. I found that I was not using the appropriate language. Apparently I needed to say "marking" and "un-marking" not "highlighting" and "unhighlighting". Typical.

Eventually, amongst all kinds of articles promising that I would be able to dissolve redacted text like magic in front of my eyes <snort>, I found a post by Lynne Bruzzese asking just my question. The first answer was to go to Edit | Undo. Well, I already knew that didn't work.

But the second answer was bang on: "open the 'Comments' panel and see the annotations of the type 'Redact'." We open the Comments panel by clicking on the Comments toolbar icon, then selecting "Show Comments List", and clicking on the "+" to expand the options. We then select the item we want to delete, then click the rubbish bin icon in the Comments tool bar (see the image with this post). "You can delete the comment that you do not want applied, or you can go the page where the item is marked for Redaction and delete the comment" (Bruzzese, n.d.).

Perfect.


Sam

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